On the Myth of Motherhood as Self-Improvement

And why I care as someone who has no kids and no desire to have kids

Ines Bellina

Jun 20, 2024

I often warn people I’ve just met that they’re free to follow me on Instagram but cannot hold my Stories against me. “It’s where my Id lives,” I explain. “You have to promise to keep liking me even after watching them.” I add that I’m not one to slide into their DMs to argue about politics or that they’ll be exposed to some horrific Edgelord memes. In fact, it’s usually the opposite. My Id is frivolous, perpetually thirsty, too Bravo-obsessed, quick to go for the joke, and a ravenous eater. It flies in the face of my oh-so-carefully-curated intellectual persona hehe. But yes, my Id sometimes reacts automatically and without any filter to the hot-button issues of the day and goes on an off-the-cuff-rant.

That’s what happened on June 11, when The Cut account spewed out its latest clickbait (I say this with admiration): “What If Motherhood Isn’t Transformative At All?” by Anastasia Berg. “Finally”, my Id muttered. “A mother is brave enough to say it.” Berg is an editor, a mom, and a philosophy professor and she tackles the concept of identity with a trained philosopher’s lens. She describes her experience of motherhood as one where a series of assumptions never came to fruition–she didn’t feel like her core identity had been completely reconfigured, she didn’t feel like her love for her child was unlike all the other loves, and she aptly points out how projecting this radical transformative belief onto women can cause feelings of inadequacy and isolation.

It’s a thoughtful take. In comparison, this was my gut reaction:

On the other hand, sometimes my gut knows what’s up! The idea of motherhood as self-improvement isn’t the center of Berg’s essay, but she recognizes the power it holds in our collective imagination:

“Parents, mothers especially, like to claim they have become better people subsequent to the birth of their children. I am not here to call anyone’s bluff or forswear the possibility of my own personal growth in the future...But I did not unearth new ethical or emotional resources. I am, it is true, far more patient with my daughter than I would be with anyone else exhibiting comparably high levels of incompetence, need, or obstinance. But this tolerance does not extend to anyone else. There is less of it to go around. Nor am I more compassionate. If my heart has genuinely, permanently expanded, it is by the measure of my love for my daughter, not much more. ”

I want to give her a Mother of the Year Award for admitting this because the “mothers become better people” argument is so flimsy to me, in so many obvious ways, I do not understand how it continues to be paraded around as some bullet-proof defense. In the US, our political system is constantly hijacked by the whims of Republican women, many (though not all) of them mothers, who are more than happy to trample on the rights of minorities, low-income residents, other women, and yes, children. Always in the name of protecting the children or the sanctity of marriage or the nation or whatnot. The Karening of the past decade over critical race theory, book bans, LGBTQ rights, and trans rights have manipulated this argument, if not explicitly, at least subconsciously by framing it often as caring for the safety of children, for parents’ knowing what’s right for their kids and, by parents, they usually mean the mom because dads caring about what their kids read is getting way too close to them being emasculated.

But forget the mommy monsters operating on the national stage. Forget even the moms who are truly trying their best but don’t give two shits about politics or have a vague notion of the Republican party being pro-family and don’t give their vote too much thought. In fact, bring it down to your own bubble. Maybe that bubble is, like mine, very progressive and liberal and college-educated and blue state.

We have all bitched about some nightmare mom at work, school, yoga, running group, book club, neighborhood association. We might even recognize they are extraordinary mothers–devoted, caring, investing all their free time in their little ones. But that hasn’t stopped them from treating servers like trash or nervously crossing the street when she sees Jesús coming back from his badly-paid construction job. I have heard enough complaints about Thanksgiving dinners gone awry due to mom’s newfound love for Breitbart to think their sense of compassion was permanently altered if it expanded at all.

Also, show of hands of who’s in therapy because of the permanent damage their mom did to them? I’m not talking about difficult but loving dynamics, which might be reason enough to go to therapy. I’m talking about moms who kicked you out for being gay, moms who used you as a pawn in their divorce proceedings, moms who neglected you in pursuit of one loser dude after another, moms who physically, mentally, or sexually abused you. Motherhood is not a cure-all for anyone’s inner demons.

I’m picking on moms right now because of the article but fathers are not off the hook:

This Story is pretty self-explanatory, but it does make me wonder: When did motherhood as self-improvement become a Thing? I can’t imagine my great-great-grandmother or my great-grandmother or even my grandmother for that matter bearing one child after another for enlightenment purposes. Could it be that we started shilling this fantasy when women began making inroads in education? into the workforce? In the halls of power?

Finally, no one is denying motherhood can be a catalyst for massive changes:

Berg acquiesces to this, describing how her daily life is different and the sheer horror she felt at knowing her old life, the one where she could go to the movies without a care in the world, was gone. In a troll-coded turn of events (again, I say this with great admiration), The Cut published an article the next day on the matrescence, a term coined by the anthropologist Dana Raphael and thoroughly adopted by author Lucy Jones to describe the massive biological, physical and hormonal changes a mother’s body undergoes during pregnancy and post-partum. And hey, guess what? Only a few days later The New York Times published an op-ed on how fathers also undergo brain and hormonal changes, depending on how much they actually engage with the baby—which, again, we have enough deadbeat dad jokes clogging the stratosphere to know it isn’t a given.

To say being a parent doesn’t change your life in some way sounds just as ludicrous as when newly engaged people say marriage won’t change anything because they already live together. Not to get all Heisenberg’s Uncertainty Principle on you, but presenting yourself as a mother or as a married couple will change your life in some way by sheer virtue of how society reacts to you, at the very least. But the very tangible, neurological changes the articles describe above mostly have to do with the parent bonding with a baby. From what I can tell, it says nothing about that parent suddenly becoming altruistic, generous, or empathetic to the larger world.

Look, I have no way of knowing what’s going on in everyone’s psyche and if someone tells me that becoming a mother has taken them from Grinch to Whoville mayor, I’ll believe them. From my outside perspective though—as the sole childfree woman in several friend groups, as an aunt to many nephews and nieces if we take into account my extended family, as a gossipy busybody who loves spying on people and reading the room—I can’t say I’ve seen anyone I’m close to do a massive 180 after they had kids. Most parent the way I would have predicted they would. My nerdy friends take a nerdy approach to it. My chill friends are chill about it. My anxious friends, still anxious. My friends who struggle with social pressure, are still struggling. My friends who give two rats’ asses about what others think of them are still on that wavelength. They’re all more exhausted than they’ve ever been. Do I have a hard time recognizing them? Remembering who they were in the Before Times? Wondering who this alien is before me, talking about breast pumps? Not really.

You know that Michelle Obama quote about how being president doesn’t change who you are, but it does reveal who you are? That more or less sums up my thoughts on parenthood.

Why do I even care about this debate? On an individual level, I don’t LOL. Despite being vocal about not wanting children, I rarely receive pushback from friends or family. I like to surround myself with supportive people! On a social level, I do. At a time when reproductive rights in the US are constantly under threat, motherhood as self-improvement is presented as a “fortunate” side effect of enduring a forced pregnancy. Sure, that unplanned pregnancy sucks now, but wait until you know the power of true love! I can’t help but see the parallels between the parenthood-as-fulfilling-in-and-of-itself myth and the writing-is-your-passion cliché as a reason to keep denying parents government support like universal childcare, the same way companies refuse to pay creatives livable wages. I have a friend who says having a child has made her more pro-choice than ever before. I feel the same way when it comes to government benefits for families—deciding not to have kids has made me more aware of how much parents get screwed over by the lack of a social safety net.

And what about us heathens who decide not to procreate? According to the Pew Research Center, a growing number of adults don’t expect to have kids. While reasons vary, about 56% of those adults simply don’t want to have children. The number of adults in the U.S. who are also living without a spouse or partner is rising and being financially punished for it. Adults without children and single adults are not one and the same of course—single parents exist. But I like to think they are adjacent and share the same fate of not being recognized as a serious, political entity whose needs deserve to be taken into account. In a world where bearing children is viewed as a shortcut to self-improvement, it’s easy to dismiss us as half-baked. How convenient.